That wasn't insightful, that was gibberish. It further's Congress' continual confusion between "cars people will buy", "cars good for the environment", and "cars automakers are actually making"... that's three distinct categories, and it is wrong to collapse them. (The most frequent collapse is that "cars people want to buy" are "good for the environment". This is wishful thinking. People will prefr good fuel economy, all else being equal, but they're not going to pay twice as much or give up those little niceties like "a heater". Hold the auto companies to this wishful thinking, as Congress wants, and you might as well just finish digging their grave and throw them in.)

Watch the switcho-changeo in action: "Detroit's goal has never been to sell the cars that consumers want to buy; it's been to sell the cars that will yield the highest profits. By contrast, startup car companies such as Tesla, Aptera, Fisker, Bright Automotive, and Commuter Cars have adopted the Silicon Valley mojo, using indie, engineered-in-a-garage values to develop cars that people should buy." That's content-free. Along with the category confusion, it also appears to praise the Silicon Valley companies for not chasing profits. Yeah, that's the path to success alright!

And why on Earth would the startups want to deal with the unions? Almost by definition of "union", they do not. That was just gibberish. They may have to deal with unions (ideally a nice new one, IMHO, UAW 2.0 to go with Car 2.0), and hopefully they learn from how UAW 1.0 badly hurt their host, but wanting to deal with a union is just stupid-talk. (Dealing with pay and stuff: probably OK. Defining every job down to the n-th degree so theres no flexibility, aka "work rules", and creating thousands and thousands of wasted worker-days per day: deadly.)

Unions aren't free. In fact, they are quite expensive if they have an effectiveness at all.

And as Erik says, I can spec the perfect vehicle too, that doesn't mean it can exist.